Monbiot on Greens

[Gordon Fitch]

George Monbiot:
> > So the environmentalists taking the corporate buck in the
> > name of cleaning up companies' performance are, in truth,
> > helping them to stay dirty by bypassing democratic
> > constraints. But because corporations have invested so
> > heavily in avoiding democracy, CSR has become big business
> > for greens.
> >
> > In this social climate, it's not hard to see why Peter
> > Melchett imagined that he could move to Burson Marsteller
> > without betraying his ideals. It was a staggeringly naive
> > and stupid decision, which has destroyed his credibility and
> > seriously damaged Greenpeace's (as well, paradoxically, as
> > reducing his market value for Burson Marsteller), but it is
> > consistent with the thinking prevalent in some of the bigger
> > organisations.
> >
> > Environmentalism, like almost everything else, is in danger
> > of being swallowed by the corporate leviathan. If this
> > happens, it will disappear without trace. No one threatens
> > its survival as much as the greens who have taken the
> > company shilling.

Chuck Munson:
> Monbiot does a better job of taking the pulse of an ill patient than he
> does in recommending a cure. It should be pretty obvious by now that
> environmentalist reformism is a dead end that is easily co-opted by
> corporate greenwashing and corporate hiring of reformist sellouts like
> Peter Melchett. While the reformist environmental movement has achieved
> some real goals over the decades, it is inherently incapable of
> transcending the methods in which capitalism has recuperated it.
>
> What we need now is a return to direct action, i.e. a dialougue with
> capitalism like the one the black bloc conducted on the streets of
> Seattle in 1999. Monsanto isn't on the ropes because of the Sierra Club
> or Greenpeace--it was put there by illegal direct action and sabotage
> conducted by thousands of activists around the world.
> ...

I think it's also necessary to make the class-war source of
environmental destruction completely explicit -- it's implicit
in what you say above, but apparently this analysis hasn't
gotten through to a lot of people, hence Monbiot's belief that
bourgeois regulation is _the_ solution to environmental
destruction even in the face of the ease with which it has
just been bought off and betrayed.